Thursday, July 24, 2008

Southern Ocean

Figure 2 illustrates the Southern Ocean SST anomalies from January 1854 to May 2005. The data is raw and smoothed with a 37-month filter. Using the smoothed data as reference, the significant rise in SST from the mid-1960s to the early 1970s is unusual, especially since it’s followed by the precipitous drop that begins January 1997, a few months before the start of the El Nino of the century.http://i38.tinypic.com/ddesko.jpgFigure 2

In Figure 3, the time span has been shortened to 30+ years. It’s interesting to note that even though the trend was negative, the late 1990s rise in SST occurred before the 97/98 El Nino and that the later spike happened in September 1999, almost a year and a half after the peak of that El Nino. A Rossby wave maybe?http://i38.tinypic.com/2n6rwon.jpgFigure 3

The SST anomalies of the Southern Ocean segments are then illustrated in Figure 7. The areas are identified by the letters in the legend and the map. All of the curves display a significant drop in SST in recent years. The two unusual curves are those that are east and west of the Antarctic Peninsula, curves A (blue) and B (red).http://i34.tinypic.com/2jg9lb9.jpgFigure 7

Figure 8 illustrates the SST anomalies of that portion of the Bellingshausen Sea, that area west of the Antarctic Peninsula. Its data peaked in March 2006.http://i35.tinypic.com/kafg5w.jpgFigure 8

Comment Policy, SST Posts, and Notes

Comments that are political in nature or that have nothing to do with the post will be deleted.####The Smith and Reynolds SST Posts DOES NOT LIST ALL SST POSTS. I stopped using ERSST.v2 data for SST when NOAA deleted it from NOMADS early in 2009.

Please use the search feature in the upper left-hand corner of the page for posts on specific subjects.####NOTE: I’ve discovered that some of the links to older posts provide blank pages. While it’s possible to access that post by scrolling through the history, that’s time consuming. There’s a quick fix for the problem, so if you run into an absent post, please advise me. Thanks.####If you use the graphs, please cite or link to the address of the blog post or this website.